The Book of Fires (31 page)

H
ow I wish that Cornelius Soul would bring us gunpowder again. I was not attempting to ensnare him, I remind myself. It is more that I was trying to channel the natural force of his intentions.

But if I do not see him? My thoughts were so full of fire and chemicals. Perhaps I should have prayed for a chance to present itself.

I had almost forgotten my purpose. In another week it will be too late. I have reached eight months now. I touch my belly; perhaps it is too late already. I keep waiting for a rush of blood, or waters, anything. In truth I know there is little chance that the sage will work, but, God only help me, I must try everything.

So when I open the door unknowingly and find that Cornelius Soul is stood there on the step in his gray coat, winking at me, I am both relieved and newly anxious.

“Good day, Mr. Soul,” I say. I do not dare to ask why he is here. Perhaps . . .

“Just passing.” He grins.

He does not come across the threshold, though his eyes dart beyond me into the workshop from time to time. He spins his hat in the air and catches it.

“You have a new hat, Mr. Soul,” I say, looking at its gilt braid.

“Finest on Cheapside!” he replies. “And . . . I have an evening free next Tuesday and, alas, no lovely lady like yourself to spend it with.”

“Don’t you?” I say faintly, and a wave of nerves goes through me. The next moment comes swiftly.

“Could I have the pleasure of your company at the Spring Gardens, Miss Trussel?” he says, and my hand flies to my throat as if to cover it.

“The Gardens!” I say.

Behind me inside the workshop I hear Mr. Blacklock putting a tool down and pushing his chair back. Strangely, I open my mouth to decline.

“You could, but . . .” I hesitate. The Spring Gardens are a public, crowded place across the river. My heart flutters when I think of being alone there with him, in the throng of people with my baby huge inside me and due so close. But perhaps this is my only chance. I must agree.

“You could,” I say, and with an effort I look up and meet his eye directly.

“Until next week, then!” he declares. “It is a gala night, there will be fireworks.”

And a mixture of terror and delighted thoughts creeps quickly up on me, though I keep up a coolness to my manner until Cornelius Soul has turned smartly on his heel and gone away down the street.

“Fireworks!” I say under my breath, turning excitedly to Mr. Blacklock, and I see that he has left the room. Just dirty little Joe Thomazin sat there in the corner, always looking and listening, taking things in. His heels kick the back of the stool.

“What!” I ask him, but he doesn’t reply; he just looks at me. His dark eyes are big in his thin face. When I go to the kitchen I find that I am not the only woman in the household to be beside myself with excitement; Mrs. Blight has won the lottery.

 

 

Mr. Blacklock does not seem to fully hear when Mrs. Blight waves her ticket beneath his nose at noon and squeals again, “And on my birthday! The eleventh of May for once has had an auspicious bent!” She is pink with pleasure.

“Would you, sir, be so good as to allow me to prepare the household with some especial kind of supper spread tonight?” she asks. “Nice joint of beef, perhaps, sir? A bit of topside? Saddle of lamb?”

“Yes, yes,” he says, but as if he has not fully heard her.

“Tonight, sir?” she repeats as he puts on his hat.

“Yes, yes, tonight,” he barks, and goes away down the corridor. When the front door bangs shut, Mrs. Blight rolls her eyes to the ceiling.

“That man,” is all she says, getting on with her pastry. “Godly ungracious.”

Later she makes a great show of fishing about inside her wallet and holding up a shiny guinea piece, as though she were some kind of duchess. “We’ll have the beef,” she announces grandly. Mary Spurren ignores her and slips out of the room. Mrs. Blight turns and tuts at me. “You’ll have to go.”

Perhaps the rest of the day starts to go wrong from here, at Saul Pinnington’s. There is no beef topside ready, and I have to buy instead a loin of pork.

“No matter,” I say, when the butcher’s boy tries to explain their shortage. “It’s the end of the day, miss,” he calls after me, as if worried that I might get him into trouble. The streets are heaving with people and on my way back a coachman curses when I stumble in front of his horse and nearly fall.

“I could’ve killed you, silly bitch,” he shouts down at me. “Can’t you look and see what’s coming?” I want to shout back angrily, “Childbirth, death, the gallows, Bridewell, take your pick!” But I clench my teeth and do not. The noise of the city is too much sometimes, I think, choking with rage. And today as I pass the church of St. Stephen on Cole-man Street just behind the house, I make up my mind to slip inside for a moment’s peace.

Under the great carving of the Last Judgment in the porch, I have an odd sensation, and hesitate and turn about, as though somebody is watching me from across the street. But when I look, nobody is there.

Inside, the church is dim. My footsteps echo up the aisle. Mrs. Blight’s joint of pork is heavy in my basket, and with some relief I sit down and rest it on the pew beside me. I breathe the smell of stone in deeply, as if it could give me strength. Just one more minute, I think, looking toward the candles burning yellow at the altar. Outside, the world seems far away.

How close I am, it seems, to the fulfillment of my plan. Soon I will have the chance to ensure that Cornelius Soul becomes obliged to marry me. He is an honest, handsome, willful man my mother would be proud to call a son. But why is it that I feel a strong unease each time I dwell on it? Surely, in the eyes of the world, at birth it will appear to be Cornelius’s child come early, conceived before the nuptials had taken place. I am not showing much, and after all, my mother always had small babies; even Hester was just a little scrap at birth.

How can that work?
The voice in my head is still whispering.
Cornelius Soul will know otherwise.
But he is a good man, I reason, and perhaps if he knew my story then he might begin to understand? It is my only chance. Yet if it were a good solution surely I should have a growing sense of calm, with completion drawing near. But I do not; indeed, I fear that he will hate me for it.

I have begun to think that I should have another plan laid out. Something else to turn to, if everything else I try has failed.

At the altar, one candle gutters blackly, contracts and then winks out. It is a kind of drawing in of breath, a sudden shocking inward suck into the darkness.

If I were gone, I think, extinguished from my family’s lives, then they would be blameless. Better by far that they shall never know. And in the moment of calm that I am hoping to find, I remember the orpiment. The deadly yellow poison offers me a ready answer. It will still be there if all else fails.
But it is a sin to take a life!
the voice inside me whispers urgently. It is too late now, though, to think of that. One sin leads straight toward another, and there is nothing to be done about it.

They say you do not need to swallow much.

I hear the sound of feet on stones outside the porch, and a sudden voice booms, “Anyone in? ”

A hot shameful panic grips me, that someone might find me sitting here before God with my belly swollen like this, and instinctively I freeze and hold my breath. But then I hear a trundling scrape as the great door is pulled shut, and a key turns in the lock.

“No, no! There is somebody in here! I am still in here!” I call out, embarrassed, as I scramble to the porch and rap against the door. “Please come back! I am here!” But the footsteps fade away. Somewhere above me in the tower the church clock whirrs into life and I count the strokes as the bell sounds the hour. Six o’clock! How did it become so late?

A clergyman, someone, has locked up the church for the night against thieves, just as Mrs. Blight said they did. How stupid I am not to remember. I go to the north door to see if this is fastened, too, and rattle at it. I am quite locked in. It is hopeless, I think, nursing my sore knuckles. I will be here until morning. Miserably, I think of Mrs. Blight’s special supper and how she will not have her joint of meat. What will they think? The household sitting down together, raising a toast, no meat, and my place at the table unaccountably deserted. The house is so close to the church, and yet I cannot even call to them.

At first there is a glow of colored light about the stained-glass windows, and then that fades. When I become thirsty I go to the font for baptisms and drink the holy water gleaming there. It tastes of stone, or something else I cannot place. I think of the fingers of priests scooping and pouring handfuls onto the crowns of infants as they are blessed and named for this world. Perhaps if I were to confess my troubles to a priest, I would feel lighter, almost forgiven.

By now, I think unhappily, they will have finished supper. I shiver with cold and as I pull my skirts tighter about me I touch a wetness, a patch of wetness on my skirt where it lies over the pew, and I feel that the pew is pooling with some kind of liquid, and then I realize that in my basket the raw meat must be seeping through the paper it is wrapped in. I almost laugh with relief. Mrs. Blight’s wet butcher’s meat is dripping on the consecrated flagstones.

Then I clench my knees with my arms as best I can around my belly and press my face into the cloth of my skirt. I barely hear the strokes of three and four o’clock, which means that I must somehow have slept.

 

I am woken abruptly.

It is light. I hear the door being unlocked from the outside and I struggle, stiff and guilty, to my feet. A minister or curate enters and closes the door behind him with a brisk flourish. He comes down the aisle with his black vestments flapping as he walks, and stops, as I knew he would, when he sees me standing there between the pews.

“In heavens, child!” he exclaims. His voice is lilting. “What are you doing there?”

“Just sitting, sir. I—”

“Sitting! Have you been there all night? ”

“I have. I . . . needed to think.”

“Did you now!” he says. “And you thought for a long time. I’m afraid I have resorted to locking the church doors at nightfall; there have been thefts over Westminster way, you see. Was it cold? Were you waiting for me?” he asks. “God’s guidance can sometimes be slow in coming.”

I shake my head, and he smiles kindly. “Well, child, if you change your mind, God waits for us in patience.” The bell whirrs and clangs. “Unlike parishioners! If you’ll excuse me now. But if you should need to talk about your trouble, you can find me here. Reverend Lindsay is my name.”

“Thank you, Reverend,” I say, and he goes into the vestry. I wonder if God might forgive me more readily if I admit to another living person what I have done. But he is busy, I reason. Starlings are chirping in the eaves. The stained glass is brighter and more richly colored by the minute with the rising sun; I make out saints walking clearly upon the stained-glass flowers between the leaded panes, St. Genevieve with her stained-glass hands pressed together in prayer. St. Genevieve was a holder of keys, like St. Peter. And I remember how, though the Devil extinguishes her candle always, an angel lights it again and the flame burns on strongly. The nave is flooded with light and color.

I step upon the stones marking the separate graves of Henry Nicholas Cuff and Catherine Pelham in the floor of the aisle as I leave the church. The stones are new and freshly laid there, the cut letters quite unworn. How close the dead are. I am glad of the sunrise.

And I am hungry. I think of telling Mrs. Blight and Mary Spurren of the key turning in the lock, and how they will laugh at me. Yet they will not know that I am not the same girl I was yesterday, when I went in. The sage has not worked, but all of me, every last drop of blood, fat, flesh, all changed, now I have remembered that there is the yellow orpiment.

I have a final choice. God help me if I have to take it, but I will, for the sake of my family.

Out on the street, chimneys are pouring the smoke of fresh-lit fires. The air is still and the smoke pours upward in bluish columns all down the street. A crowd of swifts scream past.

It is early as I approach the house and cross the yard to the scullery door, but I know that Mary Spurren will be up riddling the grate and grudgingly might flick the bolt across to let me in, if it is not indeed already open, and if the floor is not wet with mopping.

The scrape of my boots on the bricks echoes horribly about the silent yard. I glance anxiously at the upper windows of the house to see if Mr. Blacklock has risen, but the sun is blinding them with such a sheet of early golden light that I cannot tell if the curtains are still drawn or have been parted.

I am relieved to find the back door is ajar, and edge in cautiously. No one is there; both the kitchen and the scullery are empty. I look about for signs of life, for Mrs. Blight. There is an unfamiliar smell in the darkened kitchen. As my eyes accustom to the gloom I do not see anything remarkable at first: a folded pile of aired washing waiting for the flat iron, as Mrs. Nott was here yesterday; a bundle of untrimmed rhubarb wilting on the side. And then I see the bottles. A stack of empty bottles and a half-eaten knuckle of pork from the meat safe lying uncovered on the table, and beneath it a great sticky spill of liquor and broken glass where a bottle has crashed to the floor. I go back to the scullery and see unwashed plates and cutlery. And the fire is out.

I take in these details one by one. I do not know what to make of this at all. Then there is movement in a chair beside the hob and with a start I watch the shape of Mary Spurren snort into wakefulness. She looks about her in some confusion, her large, froggish eyes bulging. She is a sorry sight. Her big head appears swollen with an ache that seems almost too much weight for her neck to bear. She gives out a kind of moan.